In the aftermath of the previous presidential election in 2020, saw legal challenges by then-President Donald Trump’s allies, resulting in court filings over Joe Biden’s Election Day victory.
As those challenges flailed and failed, several of the attorneys involved, including Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark and Sidney Powell drew complaints of professional misconduct. Some Texas lawyers drew some, too, including Attorney General Ken Paxton and one of Paxton’s top deputies.
The Texas State Bar accused Brent Webster and his boss, Paxton, of alleged misrepresentations in trying to challenge the outcome. And yesterday, the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments in the misconduct case against Paxton’s aide.
The Texas Newsroom’s Lauren McGaughy has been following all this and she joined Texas Standard to discuss. Listen to the story above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So this stems from a lawsuit filed by the State Bar of Texas. Give us some background about why they filed it and what the lawsuit claimed.
Lauren McGaughy: Sure. This was actually filed by the the state bar’s disciplinary committee. They’ve tried to make it very clear that this went through their typical investigative process around allegations of misconduct and that it’s not really the state bar, but their disciplinary committee that filed it. And it’s important to note that there’s two separate cases.
There’s one case against Brent Webster and one case against Ken Paxton. But they allege the same things – that basically both men acting on behalf of the State of Texas misrepresented facts to the U.S. Supreme Court when they challenged the 2020 presidential election results.
Well, both Webster and Paxton have denied any wrongdoing, as you were mentioning there. We should note that the Supreme Court was hearing this case brought against Webster, not Paxton, yesterday. But the arguments in the case – what were Webster’s attorneys saying?
This was really interesting.
The attorneys for Webster, who are the Office of the Attorney General’s attorneys, kind of by proxy, were arguing that there are two reasons why this lawsuit shouldn’t even be happening – that sovereign immunity protects a government entity from being sued. And Paxton, as an elected official and a constitutional officer, enjoys sovereign immunity and so do his deputies. And also that the separation of powers should keep the court system from penalizing Paxton in this way.
And, you know, that didn’t go over too well with the justices who didn’t like to be told that they couldn’t do something. But it was a very interesting back and forth between Paxton and Webster’s lawyers and the Supreme Court justices.
Very interesting. Well, now, what about the disciplinary committee attorneys? What do they have to say?
You know, they argued that there were obviously false misrepresentations that Paxton and Webster made to the U.S. Supreme Court – that we know now and that they should have known then that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election – and that they had to go through their normal practices because of a complaint made against these two men and see this thing through to the end.
They weren’t claiming that they could prove that they knew Paxton knew he was lying or Webster knew that he was lying. But they said that needs to be borne out in this case. And they need to do discovery and kind of delve into whether these were intentional lies to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Let’s get to some of these facts here, because I am a little confused. I don’t think there was any question that Trump won the Texas vote. So where did this misconduct allegedly occur?
Yeah, that’s a good point.
So the lawsuit that Paxton filed on behalf of the State of Texas was actually challenging the election results in four other states. So there were four swing states. It was not challenging the results, as you said, here in Texas, where Trump won. And so there was also a lot of back and forth in these arguments yesterday about, you know, should Texas even have filed this lawsuit?
The states where the election results were being challenged actually came back and provided evidence as to what their results actually were. And, you know, there was actually one Supreme Court justice here in Texas who said, “so we’re just supposed to take those other states at their word? We’re just supposed to believe that they properly counted the vote?”
So even now, four years later, some of the justices on the top court in Texas didn’t seem totally convinced that the votes were correctly founded in 2020.
You know, the Texas Supreme Court is made up of nine justices – all Republicans. And it was being argued these charges might be politically motivated. Any idea of a timeline here when the justices might actually decide this case?
No clear timeline. And the Paxton case itself is also a little bit behind the Webster one. So that would still potentially be heard at oral arguments.
But you’re right, they’re all Republicans. But, you know, they went pretty hard on both sides – both Paxton and Webster’s lawyers and the state bar’s disciplinary committee lawyers. So they weren’t pulling any punches. And it’s difficult to say how they may go on this.
